Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing.

The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.

I've very excited to have this feature released for CodePen. It's very progressive enhancement friendly in the sense that you can take any <pre></pre> block of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or any combination of them) and enhance it into an embed, meaning you can see the rendered output. It also lets you pass in stuff like external resources, making it a great choice for, say, documentation sites or the like.… Read article

Here’s a wonderful post by Nicolas Chevobbe on what the Firefox DevTools team was up to last year. What strikes me is how many improvements they shipped — from big visual design improvements to tiny usability fixes that help us make sure our code works as we expect it to in the console.

There are lots of interesting hints here about the future of Firefox DevTools, too. For example, tighter integrations with MDN and, as Nicolas mentions in that post, … Read article

Product teams from AirBnb and New York Times to Shopify and Artsy (among many others) are converging on a new set of best practices and technologies for building the web apps that their businesses depend on. This trend reflects core principles and solve underlying problems that we may share, so it is worth digging deeper.… Read article

Hooks make it possible to organize logic in components, making them tiny and reusable without writing a class. In a sense, they’re React’s way of leaning into functions because, before them, we’d have to write them in a component and, while components have proven to be powerful and functional in and of themselves, they have to render something on the front end. That’s all fine and dandy to some extent, but the result is a DOM that is littered with divs that make it gnarly to dig through through DevTools and debug.

I am attracted to the idea that you shouldn't care how the code you author ends up in the browser. It's already minified. It's already gzipped. It's already transmogrified (real word!) by things that polyfill it, things that convert it into code that older browsers understand, things that make it run faster, things that strip away unused bits, and things that break it into chunks by technology far above my head.

My first smartphone was an iPhone 4s. I remember the excitement of exploring its capabilities at a time when it was the coolest thing around. Eventually, of course, I replaced it with a newer model and the old iPhone, still in mint condition, gathered dust for two years. What a waste!

But was it? It occurred to me that I could repurpose the old iPhone to create a useful weather clock for our hallway.… Read article

In a sense, it's just an app for keeping documents in one place: little notes, to-do lists, basic spreadsheets, etc. I like the native macOS Notes app just fine. It's quick and easy, it's desktop and mobile, it syncs... but there are enough limitations that I wanted something better. Plus, I wanted something team-based and web-friendly (shared URLs!) and Notion hits those nails on the head.

In this article, I want to show off the flexibility and real power of amCharts 4. We’re going to learn how to combine multiple charts that run together with animations that form a movie experience. Even if you’re only interested in creating a different kind of animation that has nothing to do with charts, you can still use this library, since it’s more than making charts. The core of amCharts is made to help with everything SVG: creation, layout, … Read article

The difference between a CSS good experience and a long frustrating one is oftentimes a matter of a few small details. CSS is indeed nuanced. One of the most common areas where I see struggles is layout. Personally, I like to study patterns. I notice that I tend to use a small group of patterns to solve the majority of my layout problems. This article is about those CSS patterns I use to get myself through layout challenges. It is … Read article

I'm not so protective of CSS that I'm above hearing it criticized, but I'm certainly in agreement here. CSS does not suck. I love how the post is framed to hype up current CSS features the way features of other languages and tools are hyped:

Imagine if a tech dude walked on stage at a conference and said the following:

“This declarative language will gracefully continue on failure, allow you to write global and scoped code, and it will work

A rather full-throated argument (or rather, response to arguments against) utility (atomic) CSS from Sarah Dayan. I wondered recently if redesigns were potentially a weakness of these types of systems (an awful lot of tearing down classes) which Sarah acknowledges and recommends more abstraction to help.

I also wonder about workflow. I sort of demand working in an environment which offers style injection, so working with CSS feels smooth. I also worry that having to change HTML every time … Read article

We rolled out a new site design on January 1! This is the 17th version of CSS-Tricks if you can believe that. The versions tend to evolve a decent amount beyond the initial launch, but we archive screenshots on this design history page. Like I said in our 2018 thank you post:

This is easily the most time, effort, and money that's gone into a redesign since the big v10 design. There are a lot of aesthetic changes,

Tim Kadlec on the issues surrounding poor web performance and why it’s so important for us to care about making our sites as fast as possible:

Poor performance can, and does, lead to exclusion. This point is extremely well documented by now, but warrants repeating. Sites that use an excess of resources, whether on the network or on the device, don’t just cause slow experiences, but can leave entire groups of people out.

I recently came across an interesting sliced disc design. The disc had a diagonal gradient and was split into horizontal slices, offset a bit from left to right. Naturally, I started to think what would the most efficient way of doing it with CSS be.… Read article

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CSS-Tricks* is created, written by, and maintained by Chris Coyier and a team of swell people. It is built on WordPress and powered up by Jetpack. It is made possible through sponsorships from products and services we like.